How Did Henrietta Lacks Build Immortal Cells

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Ibrahim Abdelaziz NSCI-112 Essay 1 Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Virginia and raised on a tobacco farm. She married her first cousin, David Day and later settled near Baltimore in Turner Station where Day worked at a steel mill. This was soon after the beginning of world war two and many African Americans came north for work. One day Henrietta was sitting on her bed with her cousins, and she told them that she didn’t feel right. Henrietta thought that it had something to do with her pregnancy. After having the baby, few months later, Henrietta found out that she was bleeding and it wasn’t her time of the month. So she decided to see a doctor. She was treated at Johns Hopkins hospital, the…show more content…
While on the other hand there were some cells that last for a longer time, but it won’t actually grow. After having the routine test, in an attempt to grow immortal cells that would continuously divide and replenish themselves, Dr. George Gey took samples of all women who came to Hopkins with cervical cancer. Unlike any cells they had seen before, Dr. Gey and his colleagues that found that Ms. Lacks' cells were growing and dividing rapidly, and with mythological intensity. So Henrietta’s cells were used to test the polio vaccine to prove that it was effective so that they could release it to the public. They went up in the first space mission to see what would happen to human cells, they were exposed to atomic bombs, they were the first cells ever cloned, and the first genes ever mapped. At that time, doctors were participating in a large cervical cancer study that required the collection of cells from any patient with cervical cancer who came to the John Hopkins Hospital. Scientists were labeling the cells with the first two letters of a person's first and last name, and that’s why they gave the cells the code name HeLa. After the

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